1:1

Installation displays the anatomy of a modern apartment house – piping, heating, ventilation shafts, etc. form the functioning and full-scale infrastructure supply as in a modern city.

Sound art: Tony Ikonen

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1:1

Tea Mäkipää skilfully combines macroscopic with microscopic observation. Her works expose both the precarious nature of our affluent western societies and the absurd struggle of individuals living in them, trying to cater for their basic needs. The photographic panorama World of Plenty, for instance, lures one with a smorgasbord of seemingly inexhaustible resources where all living creatures coexist in harmony and peace. Installations such as 1 : 1 or Parasite take the baroque draping off this utopia, confronting it with the factual scaffolding of social architecture. Mäkipää’s focus is on networks and their system-inherent dependencies that determine the fabric of the world. Her work speaks of a human species so busy claiming its dominance that it risks losing track of itself.

Manuela Ammer

A sloping skeleton, 1 : 1 is equipped with all the necessary main systems (heating, water, electricity, telephone) and with lamps, sinks, radiators etc., but as opposed to the original, which stands in Helsinki, the house has no walls and is transparent. Walls, ceilings and floors — which normally conceal the channels and shafts for those systems that make a comfortable life at all possible — are missing. The threads of the infrastructure form a network beyond this, connecting the inhabitants of the house to one another despite their spatial encapsulation. 1 : 1 reveals these technical connections as well as the human relations that they symbolise. At the same time, the otherwise muffled (by interior walls and ceilings) human sounds within a house become obvious, for the inhabitants are also present with their voices — via a six-minute sound loop broadcast over loudspeakers. The upper floor is occupied by an old man, who listens attentively to all the sounds travelling through the building and comments aphoristically on the events in the house. A young family with a child lives below him, and their cohabitation runs the full ambit of audible emotion — eruptions of both love and hate.